Wheaton Woods is scheduled to be the target of a program of renewal lasting from 3 to 5 years, according to the Gazette.
The Wheaton Woods neighborhood was built, generally speaking, in the early 1950s, though of course the entire neighborhood was built over time in a patchwork of developments of subdivisions. Aspen Hill, in general, was effectively "built out" with all streets in place by the mid-1970s at the very latest. For all intents and purposes, Wheaton Woods -- with the general final build-out time-frame of the early-mid-1960s -- might reasonably be considered to be a neighborhood in its fifties, and long overdue for a significant overhaul.
According to the Gazette, one Thomas Pogue of Renew Montgomery, a Montgomery Department of Transportation program, brought the message that general infrastructure upgrades will be ongoing.
This message was delivered at the biannual general membership meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., of which I am a dues-paying member, but of which meeting I was not notified.
Astute readers of this blog -- and of other blogs dealing with the area -- will remember my long activism seeking infrastructure repair in Aspen Hill in general and in Wheaton Woods in particular. No doubt many will also recall that I got tired of complaining about the constant housing code violations, especially home overcrowding and people turning their yards into paved parking lots where over-occupied houses functioned as worker barracks with illegally parked work fleets. Rather than waste my breath complaining, I simply took pictures and mounted them at my Page of Shame.
I need not point out that the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., has a board of directors in which professional Realtors are significantly over-represented. I shall, at future meetings of the civic association, move for a general vote that no more than one director may be a Realtor or be the spouse or "significant other" of a Realtor, and that no Realtor may be the chair of the board. For years, excessive concern for personal income in the matter of recurrent home sales has both driven the thrust of the civic association's ostensible representation of the members, and limited the willingness of the civic association leadership in zealously pursuing a course of action which would have limited the unrestrained crapification of Aspen Hill, but also would have restrained the ability of Realtors to realize very significant income potential through commissions on the rapid flipping of houses.
Be that as it may: it's very good, indeed, that Wheaton Woods will be getting a major makeover. Parts of Parkland Drive south of Aspen Hill Road are visibly falling apart, as are other major roads in the Wheaton Woods neighborhood.
But who will be the major beneficiaries of this massive upgrade, this long-overdue remedy of the ongoing "slumburbification"?
A hint may be found at the website of the State of Maryland 2008 State Report Card website:
Read the graph, and check the enrollment stats.
Links to more information on Aspen Hill area schools -- including links to their enrollment and demography -- may be found at Aspen Hill Network's Schools listing.
It would seem that if enough people of one kind move in and turn the place into a slum and drive out another kind of people, the ones who drove out all of the others get new streets and sidewalks. Those who are driven out get nothing, except bitterness in their hearts.
Definitely more to come.
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